Bengaluru: Grocery delivery start-up DailyNinja Delivery Services Pvt. Ltd, which operates across Bengaluru and Hyderabad, has raised $3 million in a fresh round of funding from Saama Capital and existing investor Sequoia Capital, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

This is the second round of funding for DailyNinja, after it initially secured $1.5 million in a round from Sequoia Capital in October 2017. The company plans to use the current funding to expand its business across Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurgaon.

“This round will help us achieve our objective of reaching to 100,000 deliveries a day over the next 12 months. Our focus will continue to be on scale while ensuring better experience for our customers, we plan to bring DailyNinja to Hyderabad and Gurgaon soon," said Anurag Gupta, co-founder of DailyNinja.

“We have been impressed by the way Sagar and Anurag have built significant traction in a very capital efficient manner and with a sound growth strategy. We believe the time is ripe for rapid acceleration in this segment and we believe this is the right team which can execute and scale," added Ash Lilani, Partner, Saama Capital.

The company had also received seed funding in the past from prominent angel investors such as Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon of Freecharge, Aprameya Radhakrishna of TaxiForSure, and Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com, among others.

DailyNinja currently claims to deliver milk and groceries to 25,000 households in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Founded by BITS Pilani graduates Sagar Yarnalkar and Anurag Gupta in September 2015, the start-up operates on a subscription-based model and delivers daily needs such as milk, bread, eggs, curd, dosa batter, cottage cheese and other groceries to customer’s doorsteps.

The company plans to expand into new cities and capture a bigger customer base in Bengaluru, which is its home city, said co-founder and chief executive Yarnalkar in a statement.

DailyNinja is one of the few online grocery start-ups that saw investor attention in the past couple of months. It’s competitor Milkbasket, which operates on a prepaid model, had raised $3 million in a Pre Series A round led by Unilever Ventures Ltd.

Apart from investors, food delivery start-up Swiggy and online groceries start-up Bigbasket are also looking to double down on the micro-delivery segment that Milkbasket and DailyNinja operate in. Both Swiggy and Bigbasket are reportedly looking to enter into milk and essentials delivery as a differentiated offering.

Mint reported in April that Bigbasket, which raised $300 million from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd earlier this year, is in early talks to make an investment in DailyNinja and Milkbasket.